pictures and exhibitions, evidently published and given for lucre’s sake.  It could never have been intended to stifle the expression of thought by the earnest-minded on a subject of transcendent national importance like the present, and I will not strain it for that purpose.  As pointed out by Lord Cockburn in the case of the Queen v.  Bradlaugh and Besant, all prosecutions of this kind should be regarded as mischievous, even by those who disapprove the opinions sought to be stifled, inasmuch as they only tend more widely to diffuse the teaching objected to.  To those, on the other hand, who desire its promulgation, it must be a matter of congratulation that this, like all attempted persecutions of thinkers, will defeat its own object, and that truth, like a torch, ’the more it’s shook it shines.’”

The argument of Mr. Justice Windmeyer for the Neo-Malthusian position was (as any one may see who reads the full text of the judgment) one of the most luminous and cogent I have ever read.  The judgment was spoken of at the time in the English press as a “brilliant triumph for Mrs. Besant,” and so I suppose it was; but no legal judgment could undo the harm wrought on the public mind in England by malignant and persistent misrepresentation.  What that trial and its results cost me in pain no one but myself will ever know; on the other hand, there was the passionate gratitude evidenced by letters from thousands of poor married women—­many from the wives of country clergymen and curates—­thanking and blessing me for showing them how to escape from the veritable hell in which they lived.  The “upper classes” of society know nothing about the way in which the poor live; how their overcrowding destroys all sense of personal dignity, of modesty, of outward decency, till human life, as Bishop Fraser justly said, is “degraded below the level of the swine.”  To such, and among such I went, and I could not grudge the price that then seemed to me as the ransom for their redemption.  To me, indeed, it meant the losing of all that made life dear, but for them it seemed to be the gaining of all that gave hope of a better future.  So how could I hesitate—­I whose heart had been fired by devotion to an ideal Humanity, inspired by that Materialism that is of love and not of hate?

And now, in August, 1893, we find the Christian World, the representative organ of orthodox Christian Protestantism, proclaiming the right and the duty of voluntary limitation of the family.  In a leading article, after a number of letters had been inserted, it said:—­

“The conditions are assuredly wrong which bring one member of the married partnership into a bondage so cruel.  It is no less evident that the cause of the bondage in such cases lies in the too rapid multiplication of the family.  There was a time when any idea of voluntary limitation was regarded by pious people as interfering with Providence.  We are beyond that now, and have become capable of